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farming for the future: an interview with family farmer julia biles

by robert marcom

Where do you find a family-operated small farm in the year 2000? Why, on the Internet, naturally.

It's all about connections. When I discussed the idea of doing an article about organic versus synthetic or genetic food production, a friend of mine suggested I talk to a farmer. Not just any farmer, but a woman who grew up in the family farming tradition.

Not just any woman farmer, either. She turns out to be versed in the history of foods and the current trends in agriculture, as well.

Julia Biales allowed me to interview her on such wide ranging topics as current concerns with genetic alteration of our most basic foods, to self sufficiency for the urbanite with a green thumb. Witty and intelligent, Julia gives one confidence in the future of farming for the coming millennium.

Robert: Hi Julia, tell us about your involvement with family farming.

Julia: I have a family farm in the Adirondack mountains, much like the one I grew up on, where I grow locally adapted plants for the food service trade and for people with food sensitivities, and of course, for our own use as well.

We give tours demonstrating no-till farming, permaculture, cloning, and how to select and save seeds adapted to particular growing conditions -- in our case high and cold.

We organize our off- time around meeting up with other small- land holders, home schoolers, touring other people's work, going to college and working on degrees.

Our farm is open to the public, and we hold classes regularly on the latest techniques. We freely share seed stock, knowledge, and have participated in inner city garden programs. We are involved in the organic gardening community. I write.

One of the most pleasurable things I do is show people how raising a small garden, with hand tools and easily available supplies, can produce an important part of a person's healthy diet at low cost. With a little effort, hobby and pleasure gardens can reap real exercise and nutritional benefits.

Robert: It sounds as though farming is your life. Tell us a bit about your background, if you would.

Julia: I'm of mixed races and mixed cultures: Jewish, Gypsy, and Mongol, two generations of war baby. My father was Hungarian, and born during World War I conflicts. He got involved in the Hungarian uprising.

He eventually came to the United States, where he taught gymnastics to upper class New York City girls. He ran off with his drinking buddy's teen age daughter.

They didn't know much about the country. They moved to Watertown, New York, unprepared for the deep cold and harsh conditions. They eventually settled in an area where a large proportion of the people are Native American. The Native Americans helped them out enormously and provided an accepting culture for their (Native American featured) kids.

I left, and then moved back, to raise my own family. Change the particulars and you get the background of most of the family farmers I know -- freethinkers for generations, involved in and opinionated about politics, religion, and other issues they believe in, more than most people I've met. And, I tried all kinds of lifestyles before coming back to farm.

Robert: Family farming in the age of giant "agrifactories" is a risky occupation, isn't it?

Julia: Family farmers are far more accepting of fear within themselves, and capable of handling life within the parameters of managed risks, than most people I've met. My family is no exception.

Being willing to family-farm today, in the era of agrifactories, is living your life for your beliefs, and that typifies those who start up or remain on small-holdings farms. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, years from now, groups of us were seen starting another Amish-Mennonite type group, taking, as will fit, from today's culture but not open to everything.

Like the Amish, we are living the life we would like to. We take vacations not to get away from our jobs, but to learn and grow, and meet up with like minded people. It's interesting talking with people who don't farm, who go on "play" vacations.

I was talking with someone about going to a Magician's convention and learning more about that craft, and about being able to socialize with other performers, and she said, shocked, "But don't you ever just *quit*?" Well, no. I love what I do.

Robert: It sounds as though you certainly have a full day. Have you formed opinions regarding genetic manipulation of food sources?

Julia: The problem of unintended consequences looms in my mind. Take wheat. This plant has three parents -- three separate groups of seven chromosomes. Durum wheat and the older grains have only one or two types of gluten, so they don't rise well, but a proportion of people with wheat intolerance can eat these without trouble. Add the extra set of DNA and you have two molecularly different types of gluten, and a lot of it. You can pop a handful of triploid wheat berries in your mouth, chew, and blow bubbles like bubble gum!

Robert: Which do you see as representing the best hope for providing an adequate local food supply for the Third World in the future:

Organic production methods?

Synthetic foods?

Genetically altered foods?

Julia: Actually, more pavement is the answer. Most famine today is caused by failures of distribution, exacerbated by wars and hatred.

But to your question:

* Organic production methods?

We're learning so much about how to improve species quickly. Teaching people to clone for themselves is a way of saving on seed costs -- if you take a snip from an indeterminate tomato plant you can keep that plant alive and going pretty much forever, just keeping that bit in water and feeding it over the winter, and taking cuttings from it to plant out in the garden, for example. Selecting seeds from the best of your crop allows for continual improvement in your gene line.

* Synthetic foods?

Technically, I'm not strictly organic in practice. I have asthma and use an inhaler. If I could go without, I would, but it's medically necessary at this time for me. I'm not going to risk my health on ideals. Farmers in Europe also use this sort of technique on their fields -- when needed, only as needed, using synthetics to build up humitic nutrients. I don't do this myself but I don't need to. It may be that there are ways of balancing the two approaches into something less doctrinaire and more productive.

* Genetically altered foods?

Dr. Kelsey and Dr. Borlaug fight it out in my mind every time I choose a new seed or try a new technique. Where do you draw the line between potential benefits and unknown harm?

Although I disagree with him on some important points, Norman Borlaug is among my role models.

Robert: On what point do you most agree?

Julia: I agree with Norman Borlaug that we can indeed feed the world, and feed far more people than we have now, on less land with less labor, and that expanded knowledge will be the key. I agree that roads and contacts with other cultures are the key to world peace and to ending world hunger. The lack of infrastructure in Bosnia and in Africa have a lot more to do with starvation than do particular crops.

Robert: On what do you disagree with him?

Julia: I strongly disagree with him that cultural stagnation can be addressed by bringing in new genomes alone.

I strongly disagree (to the point of anger) that there should be a different safety standard for poor people and crops than for rich people, and that those who are opposed to the biotech crops are doing so out of callous indifference to the poor -- check out this month's Reason Magazine for his current rant.

Robert: Finally, would you like to offer any information or opinion which you feel is pertinent to the discussion of organic vs synthetic or genetically altered foods?

Julia: The new developments are coming too fast and happening too carelessly. We grow enough food now to feed all of us but political barriers create starvation, in developing nations leave us dependant on agribusiness.

It took some incredibly good fortune, and a whole lot of looking, for me to find independent technologies that I could learn to use for myself; to do what the big seed companies couldn't do -- create strains for my plot of earth specifically.

We don't need more "big brains," we need better trained, more independent farmers. In particular, we need women farmers.

I've worked in inner city areas showing how, even in the middle of an urban area, a ten by ten plot can produce valuable food in a small amount of time with low tech tools.

I've worked with rural people, showing them how to use readily available techniques to keep a garden going longer, grow better safer crops, and preserve these crops for easy and delicious meals.

Skip a couple of television shows twice a week and you can grow for yourself; save money, while losing a little wieght, by way of a change of lifestyle.

Economic liberty can be as easy as ten by ten square feet by one hour a week by a few dollars of supplies, beating the stock market at its best. All you need to do is know how and do it.

And more people would love to know how.

What we are willing to trade for the very real risks is the time to be a family. To get to know each other, to be free to make our own working hours. Probably, the sweetest result is to be able to live alongside your children, and your family.

I've probably had more time with my husband in our ten years together than my grandparents did in sixty years of marriage. My kids don't see me as someone from another generation, they see me as like themselves, like they will be and I know, really intimately know my family as they know me. Never mind quality time, we've shared so much of what's really mattered to each other. We are all here for each other in work, in play, and because there's no 'boss' to pay besides ourselves and no commute, we have far, far more free time.

Free time, control over our lives and our choices, you don't get to live your life over again. I'm more than willing to take on some controlled risk to live the life I've dreamed about -- Little House on the Prairie, real time.

Robert Marcom is the Moderator of NetAuthor (www.netauthor.org), Vice Chairperson of Eguild (www.eguild.org) and author of A Voyage Through The Cosmos and The Earth